South China Sea disputes, China-Russia ties, and HK's new national security law
+ Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi's visit to Australia
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THROUGH THE LENS
XINJIANG
Japan Lawmakers Seek Probe of Carmaker Links to Xinjiang Abuses
Human Rights Watch
A group of Japanese ruling party and opposition lawmakers are calling on the government to investigate links between carmakers and forced labor in the aluminum industry in Xinjiang, a region in northwestern China.
Human Rights Watch published a report earlier this year exposing global carmakers’ failure to minimize the risk of Uyghur forced labor being used in aluminum supply chains. The Diet members urged the Japanese government to provide “measures and alternatives” to tainted aluminum.
POLITICS & SOCIETY
Xi Focus: Xi calls on Hunan to write its chapter in Chinese modernization
Xinhua
President Xi Jinping has called on central China's Hunan Province to stay committed to reform and innovation and follow a realistic and pragmatic approach to write its own chapter in advancing Chinese modernization.
Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, made the remarks during an inspection tour to the province from Monday to Thursday.
Xi urged Hunan to build itself into a national hub for important and advanced manufacturing industries and a sci-tech and innovation center with core competitiveness, and continue to be a pacesetter for reform and opening-up of China's inland regions.
Silver lining: Tutoring the elderly is growing fast in China
Reuters
China's rapidly aging population is fuelling a promising and fast-growing market for companies providing recreational classes and activities for the elderly middle class, from yoga to African drumming and smartphone photography.
The growth potential of the industry contrasts sharply with the decline of the after-school private tutoring sector following a government crackdown in 2021 aimed at boosting record low birth rates by lowering education costs.
"Education industries are transitioning to the silver economy," said Qiu Peilin, the Beijing head of Mama Sunset, an elderly learning business which has opened five centres in the Chinese capital since launching in April 2023.
Consulting firm Frost & Sullivan expects China's senior learning market to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 34% by 2027 to 120.9 billion yuan ($16.8 billion), up from 28 billion yuan in 2022.
It's a numbers game.
Over the next decade, roughly 300 million Chinese will enter retirement - the equivalent of almost the entire U.S. population. One in every two people aged over 65 in the Asia-Pacific region will live in China by 2040, Euromonitor estimates.
While China's demographic crisis is threatening its industrial base, government finances and poverty alleviation efforts, some investors see the growing pool of elderly as a sure bet.
Many hospitals in China stop newborn delivery services as birth rate drops
Reuters
Many hospitals in China have stopped offering newborn delivery services this year, state-backed news outlet Daily Economic News reported, with industry experts warning of an "obstetric winter" due to declining demand amid a record drop in new births.
Hospitals in various provinces including in eastern Zhejiang and southern Jiangxi have in the past two months announced that they will close their obstetric departments, according to notices viewed by Reuters.
The Fifth People's Hospital of Ganzhou City in Jiangxi said on its official WeChat account that obstetric services would be suspended from March 11.
Zhejiang's Jiangshan Hospital of Traditional Medicine announced on its WeChat page that its obstetrics business would stop from Feb. 1.
The closures come as Chinese policymakers grapple with how to boost young couples' desire to have children as authorities face a growing demographic headache of a rapidly ageing society.
‘Insane’: Xi’s call for ethnic Chinese to tell Beijing’s story stirs anger
Al Jazeera
Beijing often states that there are about 60 million people of Chinese origin living abroad in nearly 200 countries and regions, presumably excluding those living in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, the self-ruled island that the CCP claims as its own. People of Chinese ethnicity can trace their roots back centuries in countries like Malaysia, where they make up some 23 percent of the population, and Thailand and Indonesia.
In the telling of China’s story, Xi has recently highlighted the role that “Chinese sons and daughters at home and abroad” must play in “uniting all Chinese people to achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”.
According to Associate Professor Ian Chong Ja, who teaches Chinese foreign policy at the National University of Singapore, Xi’s language suggests that the CCP sees ethnic Chinese across the world as a vehicle to mobilise support and advance Beijing’s interests, even if those people are not nationals of China and have no allegiance to the country.
HONG KONG & MACAO
Hong Kong Adopts Sweeping Security Laws, Bowing to Beijing
The New York Times
Hong Kong on Tuesday passed national security laws at the behest of Beijing, thwarting decades of public resistance in a move that critics say will strike a lasting blow to the partial autonomy the city had been promised by China.
The new legislation, which was passed with extraordinary speed, grants the authorities even more powers to crack down on opposition to Beijing and the Hong Kong government, establishing penalties — including life imprisonment — for political crimes like treason and insurrection, which are vaguely defined. It also targets offenses like “external interference” and the theft of state secrets, creating potential risks for multinational companies and international groups operating in the Asian financial center.
Analysts say the legislation, which will take effect on March 23, could have a chilling effect on a wide range of people, including entrepreneurs, civil servants, lawyers, diplomats, journalists and academics, raising questions about Hong Kong’s status as an international city.
An earlier attempt to pass such legislation, in 2003, set off mass protests involving hundreds of thousands of people.
But this time many of the opposition figures who might have challenged the legislation have either been jailed or have gone into exile since China’s ruling Communist Party, under Xi Jinping, its most powerful leader in decades, imposed the first national security law, in 2020. That law gave the authorities a powerful tool to quash dissent after months of antigovernment demonstrations engulfed the city in 2019.
Hong Kong’s Beijing-backed leader, John Lee, has said the package of new laws is needed to root out unrest and to fight what he described as Western spying. Once the laws are passed, he has said, the government can focus on the economy.
Article 23: Hong Kong's new, local security law comes into effect
HKFP
Hong Kong’s homegrown Safeguarding National Security Ordinance has come into effect, four days after the legislation was unanimously approved at the city’s opposition-free legislature.
European Union, UN criticise new Hong Kong security law
Reuters
The European Union and the United Nations said Hong Kong's new national security bill was deeply worrying and could erode fundamental freedoms in the China-ruled city.
"It is alarming that such consequential legislation was rushed through the legislature through an accelerated process, in spite of serious concerns raised about the incompatibility of many of its provisions with international human rights law," said United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk in a statement released on Tuesday.
Article 23 reaction: US and Britain criticise ‘incredibly vague’ new Hong Kong national security law
SCMP
The US and British governments on Tuesday criticised Hong Kong for its passage of a new domestic national security law, claiming the measure was rushed and that vague language in its provisions created uncertainty for some of the city’s residents.
While they stopped short of announcing any immediate countermeasures, the US State Department said it was “analysing” the law to understand what risks were involved for American citizens and Britain suggested it might put diplomats on shaky ground.
Strong support for democracy in Hong Kong and Taiwan
Pew Research Center
More than eight-in-ten adults in Hong Kong and Taiwan say democracy is a good way to govern, according to Pew Research Center surveys conducted in summer 2023. Yet some people in both places are open to alternative systems of government.
The Hong Kong survey was fielded before the recent passage of laws giving the government more latitude to punish people for behavior that is considered a threat to national security, including opposing the Chinese or Hong Kong governments.
In Hong Kong, 82% of adults say that a democratic system in which two or more political parties take part in elections would be a good way of governing. A similar share of adults in Taiwan (84%) say the same.
Rebooted Art Basel Hong Kong back to full strength
Financial Times
Lorraine Kiang, co-founder of Hong Kong’s expanded Kiang Malingue gallery, senses the renewed support of their city. “Galleries that took a break and tried out other cities in Asia have realised how hard [Hong Kong] is to replace,” she says. Of the cooler climes in the market, she says: “The economy isn’t booming like it was a few years ago, but there is also something more substantial. There’s perhaps less impulse-buying, and collectors are more sophisticated.” Her gallery brings a mixed booth of its artists to the fair, including work by Chou Yu-Cheng and Liu Yin.
Ed Tang, who co-runs the advisory business Art-Bureau out of Hong Kong, New York and London, is of a similar mind. “People [in Hong Kong] don’t see buying art as a speed sport now, they know it takes time,” he says. He launched his business during the pandemic so all is relative, but he is in hiring mode, recently bringing in auction data expert Edouard Benveniste as a partner, with appointments in Hong Kong on the horizon.
The revival of Hong Kong’s art market goes beyond Art Basel, notes its director Angelle Siyang-Le. Auction houses, whose executives know where the biggest business happens, are piling in with new, starchitect-designed buildings. Last year Phillips opened a swanky space designed by Herzog & de Meuron and LAAB Architects, opposite M+; Sotheby’s has commissioned the Rotterdam architects MVRDV to design its new “Maison” to open in the Landmark Chater luxury retail building in July; Christie’s is due to become the anchor tenant in the nearby Henderson skyscraper, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, later this year.
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